The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld

About this event

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Altered States presentThe Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld - Live in LondonJoin us at our beautiful boutique home venue, The Fox in Lewisham, as we celebrate the 35th anniversary of this seminal album.We'll be welcoming a stellar lineup of supporting artists across both the indoor and outdoor spaces. For now, we're excited to reveal that System 7 will be joining us - with more special guests to be announced soon.The Orb are on stage at 22:00, but the event will also carry on into the early hours.Grab your ticket while you can!Music starts at 5pm, but come early !!-The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld wasn't just an album, it was a dimensional rift, a gentle cosmic shockwave that rewired what electronic music could be.In 1991, when rave culture was accelerating toward harder, faster sounds, The Orb - Alex Paterson with key collaborators like Jimmy Cauty (KLF), Kris Weston, Youth, and the unmistakable presence of vocalists and sample-spirits such as Andy Falconer and the mighty Steve Hillage, chose a different path. Instead of going up in energy, they went out, drifting deep into a panoramic, slow-motion universe of ambient textures, dub weight, and starlit imagination.This album expanded the idea of a "dance record" into something borderless and cinematic. It blended environmental soundscapes, spoken-word fragments, psychedelic guitar lines, and oceanic bass into tracks that didn't just play-they unfolded. It felt like a broadcast from a parallel dimension, where clubs were observatories and the dancefloor was a launchpad pointed toward inner and outer space.It changed the music industry by proving that electronic music could be both experimental and popular, that audiences were hungry for long-form journeys rather than just singles or DJ tools. It elevated sampling into an artform, challenged genre boundaries, and helped carve out a new, enduring landscape: ambient house. That entire wave, including The KLF's Chillout works, Future Sound of London, The Irresistible Force, even the modern downtempo and chill-electronic scenes, can trace a constellation line back to Ultraworld.The album showed that electronic music could be meditative, emotional, humorous, deeply weird, and profoundly beautiful. It invited listeners not to dance, but to drift. Not to escape the world, but to imagine another one entirely.More than thirty years later, Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld still feels like a map to someplace unexplored, a reminder that boundaries are invitations, genres are suggestions, and music can be as vast as the cosmos if you let it breathe.